A corpus-based study of linking adverbials through contrastive analysis of L1/L2 PhD dissertations

Hilal Güneş

Abstract

The quality of a writing highly depends on cohesion and coherence as they affect the tone of writing to a great extent. Linking adverbials (LAs) are among the types of cohesive devices which help connect ideas in a more smooth way. However, use of linking adverbials is often problematic for non-native speakers of English as they often overuse, underuse or misuse them in their writings. This study aimed to compare LAs used by Turkish native speakers (TNSs) in their English written PhD dissertations with LAs used in PhD dissertations of native English students, and detect if LAs are overused or underused by TNSs. Of all the chapters, conclusion chapters were selected for the analysis. AntConc software was utilized for the quantitative analysis. Frequency counts and log-likelihood calculations were utilized to determine if the frequency differences between two corpora have reached statistical significance. The results indicated a significant overuse of linking adverbials by Turkish doctoral students in their PhD dissertations. The study concluded with discussions of overused LAs as well as pedagogical implications and suggestions to improve teaching practices and materials

Bolton, K., Nelson, G., & Hung, J. (2002). A corpus-based study of connectors in student writing: Research from the international corpus of English in Hong Kong (ICE-HK). International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 7(2), 165-182.